Kerry Muir

2019 Winner, Editor's Prize, Sunspot Lit
Excerpted in Best Women's Monologues 2020 (Smith & Kraus)

San Fernando Valley, winter of 2004. Sixteen year-old Maeve runs away from her group home in Lancaster, and falls into a relationship with an older man who claims to be the legendary, missing-from-the-scenes, rock 'n roll frontman, Axl Rose. Months later, a very-pregnant Maeve is determined to track down the "rock star", only to find him living in a two-bedroom tract home in Reseda with his emotionally unstable girlfriend, Missy. In a surreal, rainy-night encounter, the three characters confront one another as they struggle to distinguish fact from fiction, past from the present, and dream-life from waking reality.

Winner of the 2012 Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition
(original title, "Cut-Ups")

Two orphan girls, Haley and Renata, inhabit a surreal landscape following the death of their mother, a silent movie fanatic and ex-Red Light District actress. The girls eke out a secret existence in a bombed-out, empty, charred shell of a home, with only some remnants of old furniture, everything burned or charred at the edges. Haley and Renata grieve the loss of their mother in distinctly different ways: Haley, the younger, escapes into fantasy, as well as into the images from the silent films her mother used to love; while Renata buries her grief under an avalanche of household chores. The girls bicker, dream, commiserate, entertain one another, keep house and live by their wits. But when Buster Keaton mysteriously appears on the eve of Haley’s ninth birthday, the boundaries of the girls’ reality are stretched to breaking point. The surreal, magical arrival of Buster Keaton sets in motion the unraveling of secrets, both past and present, and is the catalyst for the discovery by both girls that they must leave one another behind, and find their own separate ways in the world, if they are going to survive.

(Hon. mention, Kilroys' THE LIST, 2016)

A magical realist-family saga set on California's central coast one year after the U.S. economic collapse. Carla, a single parent in her early thirties, is at her wit’s end keeping her eccentric family afloat. Her father, a retired academic and blocked writer, makes money only sporadically as a gambler. Her teenaged daughter, Esme, is drifting further and further into troubled waters; her five year-old son, Jasper, suffers from nightmares and jumbled syntax. Julian’s lover, Gerard, is also an unemployed academic with little to contribute in the way of finances. When the family's path crosses that of two undocumented workers from Oaxaca, Mexico, buried family secrets surface, exposing old scars inflicted by the U.S./Mexico border—and giving Carla one last chance to right the wrongs of the past.

(Winner, Nantucket Short Play Festival; Runner-Up, Great Platte River Playwrights' Festival)

Three tweens - a boy who can't stop talking, a girl who can barely speak and a girl who claims to drive her own Cadillac - are drawn into an unlikely friendship. On the fringes of a playground, they weave a web of fantasy and drama in which they seek refuge from the problems they face in reality. When these two worlds collide, each of the kids must face the challenge of dealing with hard truths, while keeping hope alive. NEW SPANISH TRANSLATION AVAILABLE, contact the author. Music (underscoring) by Bettina Covo available upon request.

Since becoming sober, Aldo suffers from sporadic, involuntary blackouts where he experiences a parallel world of mystery, danger and uncanny grace. His ex-drinking buddy, Rob, seeks a rational explanation for his friend's peculiar episodes. Is Aldo dreaming? Psychotic? Is he some sort of visionary in the making? Or could it be that Aldo's merely fallen in love? High above in shadows, unbeknownst to the two men, a mysterious young woman (the aerialist) observes them from her high wire (or trapeze, lyra, or silk aerial fabric, depending) from a parallel dimension that is part-dream, part-spirit world, part-alchemical realm. Moved by the plight of both men, she does her best to intervene and change the course of fate.

A psychological thriller that chronicles the life journey of aging movie queen, Rita Hayworth. Now in her early sixties, her career in tatters, the star is mandated by court order to undergo treatment for alcoholism at a posh mental hospital in Connecticut, where she's forced to confront the events of her troublesome past as a young flamenco dancer in her abusive father's vaudeville act.

A wild rodeo of a love story for two fifty-somethings set in a motel room in Gilroy, California, with otherworldly overtones and the strangest light fixture on earth.

14 year-old bookworm Tara Lee loves a good story, and has no interest in firearms. Her pragmatic, protective father, Gunther, however, is determined to teach her how to wield a gun. To engage her interest, he spins a mythic tale of the old Wild West, complete with gunslingers and desperados. But when fiction begins to infringe on reality, the shooting lesson veers off track.